GILLIAN LYNNE, CBE, dancer, actor, choreographer, director and producer, is one of this country’s most multi-talented and industrious success stories.

For more than half a century and on both sides of the Atlantic, her work on stage, big screen and television, including The Match Girls, Half A Sixpence and The Muppets, has earned rave reviews and showbusiness awards.

Six productions of her blockbuster hits, Cats and The Phantom Of The Opera, are currently showing on three continents. Gillian is also the living embodiment of the term “a natural woman” and still has, at 85, a discerning eye for the opposite sex.

She shakes her head vigorously in denial as she lounges comfortably in her luxurious north London home and insists on being known as Mrs Peter Land. Simply being the wife of the man she married 31 years ago is, she claims, good enough for her.

“Once I met Peter,” she says, “I never looked at another man.” If her career has been frenetic, her love life has been colourful, which is the understatement of the 21st century. This makes her autobiography, A Dancer In Wartime, all the more intriguing, not to say puzzling.

Gillian was born in 1926 but the book starts in July 1939, two months before the outbreak of the Second World War and the event that she insists shaped her life: the death of her mother Barbara in a road accident.

The story ends on her 20th birthday, February 20, 1946, the day she danced in the Royal Ballet’s performance of The Sleeping Beauty at a post-war Royal Gala performance reopening of London’s Covent Garden Opera House.

This slim volume, packed with black and white snapshots, is a clever two-pronged marketing attack; on one hand nostalgia for a simpler pre-war world spiced up by the spirit of the Blitz, on the other the traditional girly ballet book for Christmas.

Yet there is so much more to Gillian than pillow fights in the boarding school dormitory and dancing the Fairy of the Enchanted Garden for King and Queen.

When I met Gillian she walked all over me. I was one of three Royal Ballet School male students chosen to back her in her own choreographed appearance in an opera.

Most of our time was spent sprawled at her feet in adoration and little did we realise our budding star was about to jump ship. “I never thought,” she says, “that Ninette (de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet) would promote me to the top rank alongside Margot Fonteyn so when I heard the London Palladium was looking for a ballerina I applied and got the job.” Her salary jumped from £15 to £40 a week.

“I was a success,” she recalls. “Ninette came to see me and asked me back but I had smelled another world, one that I knew I could conquer. I was greedy for success and turned her down.”

Perhaps it was no coincidence but her first marriage then started to crumble. “My mother said: ‘Try to give the man you marry a fresh canvas which he can paint,’ so I was a virgin when I married Patrick [St John Back] and sexually didn’t know where I was going. He just did not turn me on. Suddenly a complete new life was opening up.”

Errol Flynn was the next innovation when she appeared in The Master Of Ballantrae, filmed in Sicily. “The affair was just when we were together filming,” she says, “but it was enough to show me that I wasn’t frigid. It was an amazing breakthrough. Errol was 44 then but he was still very beautiful and incredibly witty.”

The breaks kept coming. In 1954 Gillian took Gwen Verdon’s role in the West End production of Cole Porter’s Can Can and she was frequently seen around town on the arm of film stars such as José Ferrer. She bumped into Mel Ferrer, former husband of Audrey Hepburn.

“He came up to me in the foyer of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel,” she remembers, “and said: ‘I’m making a film of Peter Pan and you’ve got to do it.’ We were friends for a very long time. I’m a very sexy person. I had a lot of men after me but every time the career won.”

Until Peter Land that is. In 1979 West End tsar Cameron Mackintosh revived My Fair Lady at the Adelphi Theatre; Gillian choreographed and a bright new talent, Peter Land, waited to be auditioned for the juvenile lead, Freddie Eynsford-Hill. “Cameron insisted I went to the cast ‘meet and greet’. I went up to the bar all hot and sweaty, hair all over the place and there he was leaning against the bar. He was drop dead beautiful. We looked at each other and he said: ‘You must be Miss Lynne,’ and I replied: ‘And you must be Freddy Eynsford-Hill,’ before I saw him dance a step.”

A year later they married. Lynne was 54, Land 27, precisely the number of years separating them. Eighteen years later, Land left. “Look, darling,” she says, “you can’t marry someone 27 years younger than you without knowing the day will come when they will fl y away.” They were apart for four years. “It was a huge leap,” she admits, “together for 18 years then you say ‘OK, I’ll let go’. It wasn’t easy. I was making the film of Cats at the time and when that finished he was on the phone a lot and he was on the way back.”

The colossal success of Cats (1981), and The Phantom Of The Opera (1986) has made Lynne a multi-millionairess, so how does she face the diminishing future, cushioned as she is by love and financial security?

“I feel both fulfilled and itching for something more,” she says, “an eternal restlessness. I wake in the morning and think: ‘Is today the day?’ I am so happy I don’t want to go, but I have the peace of being in a loving partnership and I know he will be looked after when I’m gone.”

Lynne owns properties, among others, in New Zealand, New York, Beverly Hills and a country pile near Chichester, West Sussex. “I wear skirts up to here,” she goes on, gesturing around the top of her still sensational legs, “because the day you cannot be bothered with sex, you’ve really had it, so I want to be continuously desirable. Wouldn’t you if you were married to someone 27 years younger than you?” There’s no answer to that.

A Dancer In Wartime: One Girl’s Journey From The Blitz To Sadler’s Wells by Gillian Lynne is published on Thursday by Chatto & Windus at £14.99. To order a copy with free UK delivery, send a cheque or PO made payable to the Sunday Express Bookshop to: PO Box 200, Falmouth TR11 4WJ, or telephone 0871 988 8366 with card details or order online at expressbookshop.com. Calls cost 10p per minute from BT landlines.